Good Friday: An Anti-Roman Triumph?

Jesus' Death and Triumphal Processions

A paradox lies at the heart of Good Friday. In Roman eyes, Jesus’ crucifixion was the suppression of yet another messianic pretender. Crucifixion was Rome’s way of saying, Ah! so you think you can exalt yourself above the Empire… let us ‘lift you up’ so all can see. It was a parody of exaltation.¹

Yet very early on, Jesus’ disciples came to see this parodic exaltation – the moment of his total humiliation – as the ultimate Triumph of God. In the theology of one early Jesus follower, it was in Jesus’ death that God ‘nailed our sins to the cross’ and ‘disarmed the rulers and authorities… triumphing over them in it’ (Col. 2:15)

The imagery of ‘triumph’ here is distinctly Roman. It alludes to one of the highest honours a Roman general or Emperor could receive: the opportunity to parade their vanquished foes through the streets of Rome before meeting their gruesome end. For Jesus’ followers, the imagery of the triumph was inverted. In his procession to the cross as a victim of Rome, Jesus became its Triumphator.

A short walk from where I write today stands the Arch of Titus (81 CE), whose panels depict the triumphal procession of Vespasian over Jerusalem a decade prior.

It is clear that some of Jesus’ earliest followers framed Jesus’ crucifixion in relation to a Roman ‘triumph.’ Yet a question which is less often discussed is whether any of the evangelists employed the same triumphal motif; whether Jesus is already Triumphator in the Gospels.

In a 1995 paper, T.E. Schmidt proposed that Jesus’ procession to the cross in Mark 15 echoes a whole litany of Roman triumphal activities.² Yet until the recent work of Adam Winn, scholars have largely overlooked his proposal.³

I therefore want to give this reading another look. Was Jesus’ procession to the cross likened by Mark to triumphal processions? We might begin by setting out the parallels Schmidt has found en nuce, before offering a critique.

Mark 15 and the Roman Triumph

• The Praetorian Guard. For Schmidt, Jesus’ triumphal procession begins with the gathering of a Roman troop. The Praetorian guard were always present at a Roman triumph. It is noteworthy then that Mark tells us that Jesus was taken to the Praetorium (military headquarters), where ‘the whole cohort’ were gathered. This would be an unusually large number of soldiers to mock a single prisoner.

• The Mockery of Jesus. With the soldiers present, Jesus is decked in a purple robe and crown, and parodistically saluted as a King. Again, this is unrealistic if taken literally: purple was an expensive colour worn only by the elites – it was not the kind of robe lying around. Yet literarily, Jesus is adorned as the Triumphator.

• The Procession to Golgotha. As Jesus begins his triumphal procession, he is accompanied by Simon of Cyrene, who bears his cross, the instrument of his death. In a similar way, a sacrificial bull in a Triumph was accompanied by a Roman official, carrying a double-bladed axe on his shoulder.

• They ‘Bore’ Jesus. During the procession, Jesus is ‘led out’ and it is said ‘they bore’ him to the cross. While this could indicate Jesus’ growing physical weakness, it could also echo the custom of the Triumphator being ‘borne’ in his curule, a portable chair placed upon his chariot.

• The Term Golgotha. Jesus arrives at Golgotha, a Hebrew word Mark uncommonly translates: ‘the place of the head/skull’. This would remind readers of the Capitoline Hill, from the Latin Caput (head), the final destination of every Roman Triumph, and home to the Temple of Jupiter where offerings were made.

• Jesus’ Elevation. On the cross, Jesus is placed in between rebels to his left and right, a formation symbolising the central figure’s glory. Similarly, in a Roman Triumph, an Emperor would be elevated above the festal throng, with his generals to the left and the right of him. Vespasian rode alongside Titus and Domitian.

• Wine and Sacrifice. Jesus is offered wine on the cross but refuses to drink it. In a similar way, the Triumphator would refuse to drink wine before it was offered as a sacrifice to the gods. In having Jesus die immediately after after his refusal to drink the wine, Mark links wine and sacrifice.

• The Son of God. In the moment of his sacrifice, Jesus is proclaimed as the ‘Son of God’. This was the same term used to describe the Emperor, who in the Roman Triumph was dressed as a god, and thus depicted as divine.

Jesus the Triumphator

There is much to commend this interpretation of Mark’s passion. Here I want to focus on just four strengths of this reading of Jesus’ procession.

To begin with, the Triumph was one of the best known spectacles in the Roman world. Prior to Mark, Paul had already applied triumphal imagery to Christ, claiming that he ‘always leads us in triumphal procession’ (2 Cor. 2:14). If Mark was written in Rome, the imagery of the Roman triumph would have been obvious. Even if this was not the case, a Roman reader might hear the allusions.

Second, the image of Jesus as counter-Triumphator fits with Mark’s overall characterisation of Jesus as an Emperor-like figure. As I have explored in other posts there are a number of ways in which Mark’s Jesus resembles an Emperor, or counter-Emperor: he is the true Son of God who walks on waves, heals a blind man with spittle, supplies grain, and even destroys the Jerusalem Temple. In conquering a (Roman) legion, Jesus is even presented as a challenger to the Princeps.

That Mark might cast an imperial Jesus in an imperial procession is further supported by a scene earlier in the narrative, the so-called ‘triumphal’ entry. Here already, Jesus is often taken to subvert a Roman procession or parousia (arrival). Typically, a Roman dignitary or Emperor might arrive to a city on a chariot, to be embraced by his people. Here, the Messiah Jesus enters on a donkey, looks around and abruptly leaves.

Finally, the depiction of Jesus as an anti-Triumphator fits well with Mark’s own teaching about glory. In Mark, Jesus contrasts his glory with the Gentile rules who lord themselves over others: ‘whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be a slave of all’ (10:43-45). Notably, James and John ask if they can sit on his ‘left and right’ in glory – the same expression used in Mark’s crucifixion scene. For Mark, Jesus’ crucifixion is his glorification.

Some Reservations…

Despite these readings to suspect that Mark may be shaping his traditions with respect to the Roman triumph, there are some reasons to question it.

Notably, the Roman Triumph is used by Schmidt as a schema to draw together a number of Mark’s individual features within an overall framework. We might therefore begin by inspecting whether individual elements of the passion allude to the Roman Triumph, before questioning whether the schema holds them together.

a. Triumphal Details in Mark?

One serious problem with Schmidt’s reading is that many of the individual elements which he sees as triumphal allusions can be otherwise understood. That is to say, there is nothing about them which demands a triumphal reading.

For example, Schmidt sees the gathering of the ‘whole cohort’ in the Praetorium (a military headquarters) as an allusion to the way in which the whole Praetorian guard was present at a Triumph. Yet there is nothing about this cohort which is specifically redolent of the Emperor’s elite guard either in quality or number.

Nor is there anything specifically triumphal about Jesus’ attire. If Mark were forging a triumphal connection, one might expect him to be draped in the toga picta or traebea triumphalis, a special kind of purple wool woven with golden thread. In having Jesus wear a purple robe and crown in the context of mockery), Jesus is perhaps more readily identified as a client King subordinate to Rome.

As we move from the mockery of Jesus to the procession itself, Schmidt’s parallels fare no better. There is no reason, for example, to think that the expressions ‘led out’ or ‘bore’ must be read against the backdrop of the triumph. The idea that readers are to hear an allusion to the Emperor’s portable curule seems far too subtle. It is also noteworthy that on this parade, Jesus has returned to his usual garb (15:20).

Schmidt’s reading of Simon as an allegory of the axe-holder might also be overly specific. As Helen Bond has suggested, we might equally read Simon as a lictor, the attendant who would go before a magistrate, carrying a fasces (a double-bladed axe with rods attached) across their left-shoulder, symbolising the imperium.⁴ The image of a lictor with his fasces was more familiar than a triumphal axe-holder.

Finally, there is nothing distinctively triumphal about Mark’s crucifixion scene. For example, Schmidt reads Jesus’ refusal of myrred wine as an imitation of the Triumphator’s refusal of wine. Yet we might equally see this as a fulfilment of his earlier promise not to drink wine (14:25) or an extension of the soldiers’ mockery.

b. Reconstructing the Roman Triumph

We have seen that many of the parallels Schmidt identifies are not distinctively triumphal. Yet it might still be argued that the whole generated by these details is more than the sum of their parts. Though not individually precise – perhaps due to the constraints of history? – we might suppose that the Triumph nevertheless provided a ‘script’ upon which these details might hang in succession.

The problem with this argument is that there was no clear ‘script’ of a Roman Triumph.⁵ As classicist S.C. Stroup remarks: “we know [the Triumph] was big. We know it was popular. We know it was important. But we just don’t know what it was.”⁶ Similarly, in her classic study of the Triumph, Mary Beard warns that “many of the basic “facts” and practical details… are hard, if not impossible to pin down.”⁷

In a sense, this ambiguity about what actually happened at a Roman Triumph serves Schmidt’s analysis. He is able to pick and choose elements from a whole panoply of ancient sources to find parallels to aspects of Mark’s story. Yet in a more fatal sense, it undermines it. For without a clear script of what went on during a Roman triumph, the theory that Mark parallels one is a difficult one to prove.

The Logic of the Triumph

If Mark doesn’t offer a clear narrative parallel to the Roman Triumph, does this preclude any connection between Mark and triumphal processions?

More plausibly, Allan Georgia has suggested that Mark may be engaging with the Triumph, not at the level of one-to-one detail, but with its ritual logic.⁸

One of the great ironies of the Triumph was that the defeated victims were magnified by participation within this spectacle. To deem someone worthy of parading through the streets – to laud the triumph of Caesar over King So and So – was to recognise them as kings.

For Georgia, this ‘ritual doubling’ is exploited by Mark to navigate Jesus’ ignominious death. For Mark, Christ is the victim of Roman imperial power; he processes the streets of Jerusalem to Golgotha (a clearer allusion to the triumphal hill); yet in being considered worthy of such a procession, he was implicitly acknowledged as king.

That Mark’s readers could have understood the logic of Jesus’ procession in this way is well-supported contextually. Not only was the Triumph a huge part of the ‘mental geography’ of most Romans, the slippage between Triumphator and victim was exploited in other contemporary texts (such as the popular novel, Callirohe.) Like a victim in a Roman Triumph, Jesus was unwittingly lauded by Rome as a King.

Jesus: Victim and King

So, was Good Friday a triumph for Mark?

It is difficult to pin many of Schmidt’s parallels to the Roman Triumph specifically. Yet in a deeper sense, Mark draws on triumphal logic and cues. In Mark’s story, Golgotha became the new ‘place of the head’; the locus of a ritual where a victim of Roman power was, in being a victim, exalted. In these ways, Mark narrativised what Jesus’ followers had already imagined: that Jesus’ death was also his Triumph.

1. See Joel Marcus, “Crucifixion as Parodic Exaltation,” JBL 125 n.1 (2006): 73-87.

2. T.E. Schmidt, “Mark 15.16-32: The Crucifixion Narrative and the Roman Triumphal Procession,” NTS 41 n.1 (1995): 1-18.

3. See, for example, Adam Winn, Reading Mark’s Christology Under Caesar (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2018). For criticisms of Schmidt’s original proposal, see Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007).

4. See Helen K. Bond, “Paragon of Discipleship? Simon of Cyrene in the Markan Passion Narrative” in Matthew and Mark Across Perspectives: Essays in Honour of Stephen C. barton and William R. Telford, eds. Kristian A. Bendoraitis, Nijay K. Gupta, LNTS 538 (London: T&T Clark, 2016), 33-34.

5. Allan T. Georgia, “Translating the Triumph: Reading Mark’s Crucifixion Narrative against a Roman Ritual of Power,” JNTS 36 n.1 (2013): 22.

6. S.C. Stroup, “Making Memory: Ritual, Rhetoric, and Violence in the Roman Triumph” in Belief and Bloodshed, ed. J.K. Wellman (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield), 31.

7. Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph (Boston: Harvard University Press), 118.

8. Georgia, “Translating the Triumph,” 17-38.